Issues in Human Resource Strategies That Improve Organizational Performance

In an era of organizational flux due to competition and globalization, companies and employees are faced with constant change. Leaders must be able to adapt to change as the environment shifts. HR has been known as the organizational change agent, administrative expert, and employee advocate. More recently they have been regarded as business strategic partners for many organizations. In order to be successful and remain competitive in today’s market, Human Resources (HR) must be considered a strategic partner if an organization wants to flourish. Top executives today commit significant resources to ensure that their company’s functions are capable of rapid change and achieving their

Furthermore, it is stated that HRM practices can also be categorized on the basis of their emphasis into three sets viz., quality focus, cost reduction, and differential innovation (Guest, 1997). The importance of effective HR practices can be judged by the fact that with the effective execution of HR practices, the employees tend to be more committed to their work and they go the extra mile to add to organization’s benefit.

Business environment is facing a rapid change that reminds the business management to focus on its core competencies to survive and sustain in the competitive environment. The core competencies can be developed by strategic human resource management. According to Armstrong (2006) employees are the valued assets for a company. The strategic human resource management is mainly developed in accordance to the fact that human resources need to be managed strategically for the company to enjoy sustainable competitive advantage.

Today 's fast-paced, competitive business environment has resulted in "rediscovery" of the human resource management function as a group that may be able to enhance firm competitiveness and performance by being "strategic" (Dyer & Kochan, 1995; Ulrich, 1997). Strategic Human Resource Management is a term describing an integrated approach to the development of Human Resource Strategy that will enable the organization to achieve its goals (Armstrong, 2005). Whiles strategy is an action that managers take to attain one or more of the organization’s goals. Strategy presents a general direction set for the company and its various components to achieve a desired state in the future. This results from the detailed

Martell and Carroll (1995) stated that there are two types of human resources: strategic and operative. They went on to describe four characteristics of human resource initiatives: (1) They are long-term oriented; (2) They are connected with the corporate strategies; (3) They are connected with the organizational performance; and (4) The line managers are involved in the details of decisions regarding human resource management. Too often, both operations managers and human resource mangers forget that they are working toward the same goal. Often, human resources will adopt policies and procedures that are hard for line managers to implement, and line managers expect human resources to have an inherent understanding of the processes taking place on the plant floor. The relationship between the best human resource practices and organizational performance must always

Human resources are the most valuable assets of any organization, with the machines, materials and even the money; nothing gets done without man-power. In today’s business climate, businesses are faced with stiff internal and external competition. There are various human resource functions that give an organization a competitive edge, but most scholars argue that human resource functions becomes only operational when training has run through them all. This places training and development as an essential function in the survival of any organization. Increasingly, high performance organizations today are recognizing the need to use best training and development practices to enhance their competitive advantage.

According to Chandler and McEvoy (2000) , one of the lingering questions in HRM research is whether or not there is a single set of policies or practices that represents a ‘universally superior approach’ to managing people . Theories on best practices or high commitment theories suggest that universally, certain HRM practices, either separately or in combination are associated with improved organizational performance. Researchers have also found that those well-paid, well-motivated workers, working in an atmosphere of mutuality and trust, generate higher productivity gains and lower unit costs (Boxall, 1996; Lowe and Oliver, 1991; Pfeffer,

In an era of increasing competitiveness, globalization, economic rationalization, deregulation, technological revolution and changing workforce there is an ever-increasing need for human resource management to be able to capitalize on the special challenges that this changing environment brings. For a company to be able to successfully keep ahead of the competition, human resource management is seen to be a significant contributor.

CRITICALLY COMPARE AND CONTRAST THE 'BEST FIT', 'BEST PRACTICE' AND 'RESOURCE-BASED VIEW', MODELS OF HRM STRATEGY AND EXPLAIN HOW EACH APPROACH IS ARGUED TO CONTRIBUTE TO IMPROVED ORGANISATIONAL PERFORMANCE.

The "best-fit" approach questions the universality assumption of the best-practice perspective. It emphasizes contingency fit between HR activities and the organization's stage of development, an organization's internal structures and its external environment like clients, suppliers, competition and labour markets (Redman and Wilkinson 2009). HR policy should be minted by the appropriate context of individual employees and therefore support the overall competitive strategy. Aligning HRM practices to strategies can enable companies to create potential competitive advantages (Schuler and Jackson 1987 in Redman and Wilkinson 2009).

Whether an organization consists of five or 25,000 employees, human resources management is vital to the success of the organization. HR is important to all managers because it provides managers with the resources – the employees – necessary to produce the work for the managers and the organization. Beyond this role, HR is capable of becoming a strong strategic partner when it comes to “establishing the overall direction and objectives of key areas of human resource management in order to ensure that they not only are consistent with but also support the achievement of business goals.” (Massey, 1994, p. 27)

Instead, human resource practices of ‘best fit’ are more effective when they are designed to fit certain contingencies in the organization’s specific context. Consequently, ‘best practice’ is perceived to improve performance within an organization when a select bundle of policies is implemented and the employees are managed more efficiently. Jeffrey Pfeffer’s (1994) work under this conception offers a list of seven practices assumed to be most beneficial to an organization for achieving competitive advantage ‘through people’. (1) The importance of employment security is emphasized because it is unrealistic to expect such hard work and commitment from employees without some expectation of security on their part. (2) Selective hiring is a source of sustainable competitive advantage through its “capturing” of particularly exceptional human talent (human capital). (3) Self-managed teams require efficient teamwork, and are seen as a route to achievement of more creative solutions. Employees deserve to be rewarded for

The field of human resources (HR) plays a critical role in the performance and success of organizations. As organizations have become increasingly more complex, the effective management of HR has become even more important. The traditional perception of HR as only an administrative office is no longer valid. Instead, contemporary HR is directly involved with the internal organizational structure, business operations, and variety of functions carried out by employees on a daily basis (Reed & Bogardus, 2012). HR functions impact the organization’s strategic planning, improvement processes, and goal achievement. Six core bodies of knowledge provide the foundation for all of these HR functions. These areas are: strategic

A rapidly changing business environment due to technological changes and the impacts of globalization has resulted in shift of human resources paradigms (Khan, 1997). In every organization

As the world is turning out to be more aggressive and unstable than any other time in recent memory, producing based enterprises are looking to increase upper hand at all cost and are swinging to more inventive sources through HRM practices (Sparrow, Schuler, & Jackson, 1994). HR practices has been defined by (Smallbusiness.chron.com, 2016) as “the means through which your human resources personnel can develop the leadership of your staff.”